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5

Dec

2016

GAMES Seminar: How to Measure Emotions and What for?

Is it possible to measure one’s own emotions as easy as pulse rate? Is it interesting to people to see the chart of their emotional state throughout the day? That was the topic of the regular GAMES seminar where Sofya Kulikova presented her project “Developing the prototype of a portable device for monitoring of emotional state in real time mode”.

Numerous medical studies confirm that there is strong correlation between emotional state of a human and his or her health condition. Emotional well-being affects our stress resistance, life duration, decreases the risk of many diseases.

The researcher declares that developing of a device which could estimate our emotional state and characterize it somehow is a critical task. We are used to different portable devices for our health monitoring: hand‐carried ultrasounds, pocket electrocardiographs, glucose monitors and common fitness gadgets. Today the number of users of such instruments is more than 40 million while by the end of 2019 their expected number will reach approximately 110 million which reflects the interest of people in their health monitoring. Despite the variety of devices we don’t have a way of characterizing our emotional well-being in real time mode.

Such gadget would allow to carry out timely diagnostics of emotional disturbances, to find out the factors of our emotional well-being in order to influence them and move towards personalized medicine, to develop individual practical recommendations on improving our emotional state and – as a result – our general health and well-being.

The speaker said that such device could be used by psychologists and psychiatrists for increasing the efficiency of their practice and by human resources specialists in order to find out emotional factors which affect the work efficiency. Commercial companies could be interested in this instrument for carrying out neuromarketing studies, and, of course, people could use it for self-control in everyday life.

The suggested solution is based on combination of several modern techniques which allow to analyze registered biological signals: electric brain activity (EEG), pulse and galvanic skin response. The device under development will also allow to determine individual factors affecting emotional state, by using eye-tracking technique and video-recording of environment. Analysis of factors found will allow to select automatically individual recommendations for improving emotional state by using machine learning algorithms.

The team of device developers includes GAMES senior research fellow Sofya Kulikova having PhD Neuroscience degree; senior research fellow Aleksey Buzmakov, Data Mining specialist whose task is data analysis and developing the programme code; scientific and advisory support of the project is offered by Claire Senelonge, Phd Emotional Neuroscience, who stated her willingness to test the instrument in her private medical practice in Lyon.

During the discussion the participants recommended the speaker to pay special attention to practical aspect of the research: for example, how the instrument will be useful at working with people suffering from severe depressions. The participants also noted that the idea of translation of human emotions into virtual reality may have huge commercial potential.